Hedda Gablerends with a famous bang behind closed doors. Wouldn't it, a friend once suggested, be ripping if those doors opened on a Hedda who had put an end to frustration not with a bullet but by popping open a bottle of champagne?

He had a point. The terrible is twinned with the ridiculous in Ibsen, as Anna Mackmin's exciting production proves. Alighting on the hysteria and absurdities that run through the play, and helped by Brian Friel's extraordinary new version, which hauls in a shoal of anachronisms but makes the dialogue and action skip and dangerously swerve, Mackmin does for Ibsen what many writers (including Friel) and directors have done for Chekhov: she lifts a pall of piety and shows that a swift comic touch can be as disturbing as a heavy tread.

Sheridan Smith does not so much tear through the title part as tinkle through it, pointing to the fear that has made this woman into a monster. She is a dainty demon: a spoilt child with a light voice, quick movements and a bright fixed smile that falls off her face as soon as she is alone. She deals out bullying and double entendres with snappy enjoyment: it is not only her name that marks her out as a future star of Restoration comedy. Like many gifted actors she pulls off the apparently impossible: she makes detail dominate the stage. In Smith's case it is her eyes: they glitter gigantically, and ambiguously, illumined by malice, delight and tears.

The fleetness and wryness of this radical production are enhanced by Lez Brotherston's design, in which conservatory rooms with glass-panelled doors are full of light and full of barriers. They are undermined by Paul Englishby's portentous music: ripples for the passing of time, smulchy sounds at a kiss, troubling chords as Hedda stokes the flames of the stove. They are bolstered by a terrific cast. Adrian Scarborough is a touching, exasperating Tesman, patiently registering the character's blinkered dullness while showing flashes of comic panache: he turns one of Friel's most excessive implanted episodes – a flamboyant reaction to the announcement of Hedda's pregnancy – into a high-velocity riff.

This is a production that clearly demonstrates that it is not Hedda who is the play's new woman. Fenella Woolgar's Thea – apparently small and anxious (that's to say, poor) – is a considerable figure: tremulous and steely. She begins in wobble-headed flurry; she ends with a surprising act of stealth – an extraordinary, justified, undisclosable addition to the play. It is one of many small explosive acts practised here.

There are actors you grow up with: actors who point you towards milestones in your own life and who make you recognise theatrical milestones. Jonathan Pryce is one of those actors for me. In 1980 I was galvanised by him as a Hamlet possessed by his dead father; now I am gripped by him as a father dispossessing his daughters.

Richard Eyre's revolutionary Hamlet (with Harriet Walter as Ophelia) had Pryce ventriloquising the murdered king, rasping paternal admonitions from his own throat. Then he was skinny and convulsed. In Michael Attenborough's more wary production of King Lear he is more rolling, and his voice is deeper, with a catch that suggests both the gulp of emotion and an incipient stroke.

Ken Loach has observed that it is hard to believe in a Lear (such as John Gielgud) who does not convey a strong sense of being a father. Pryce is an attentive father who also looks over-attentive, in fact fleshy: he comes up too close to his older daughters, cursing Zoe Waites's Goneril by pressing his lips upon hers and later giving Jenny Jules's Regan the same treatment. Only Phoebe Fox's too obviously pert Cordelia – a bit of a madam – goes unmolested: no wonder her sisters resent her.

Still, the power of his performance is not dependent on concept. It is to do with the memories that cling to a fading mind. He splutters early on, in a premonition of his juddering death. When he goes mad he returns to the antic games he once played with his Fool. These episodes are particularly haunting because Trevor Fox's Geordie Fool is wonderfully caustic and weary: he twines his tall frame around Pryce like ivy round a tree: it is to him Lear utters his plea that he should not go mad. As he leaves the stage prophesying doom, Fox takes off his coxcomb, as if he too were uncovering himself.

These moments shine out in a solid, often staid production. Tom Scutt's design encases the action in an unappealing brick castle, the same sepia tones as the male leggings and jerkins: perfect for conveying damp dynastic dysfunction, less good when human beings are reduced to poor forked things, and hopeless when it starts to sprout grass. The real feat of design is Jon Clark's intricate lighting which captures characters on the heath as if lightning were the brush of an old master. At one brilliant point Pryce speaks with only a few lines of his face and limbs picked out with silver: it's as if his mind were dragging his body into its own darkness.

The Judas Kiss is a more subtle and original play than I gave it credit for 14 years ago when Richard Eyre directed Liam Neeson as Oscar Wilde and Tom Hollander as Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. It's the spareness that is so surprising. David Hare writes against the grain of his subject. The speeches of the orchidaceous playwright are never fruitcakes of bons mots. A life that sped from Cafe Royal to Reading Gaol is seen through one scene in the Cadogan Hotel (where Douglas persuaded Wilde to stay and risk arrest), and another in Naples where, having laid waste to Wilde's life, he left him. There are no fans – of either sort – and few flourishes. Hare, who intended the play to be part of a trilogy about "sacrificial love", is not concerned to replicate Wilde's stage utterance but to evoke the private man.

Neil Armfield's production is a tremendous show but Hare's understated script is overplayed. Rupert Everett's Wilde and Freddie Fox's Bosie are sumptuous: there is not a moment when they are not riveting, but both behave as if they were performing in a Wilde play rather than in this one. Hunched, dewlapped and magnetic, Everett is a drawling clubman, sclerotic with upper-class, very English contempt. He looks like Wilde, with a smatter of Gore Vidal, but strains for indifference, pouncing on the meekest phrase to present it as an epigram. Fox is a finicking, flouncy, artificial, dislikable piece of work who cleverly suggests that his allure may lie in his very self-intoxication: it is toxic and catching.

The leads would have gone further with less obvious exertion. There is plenty of suggestive detail elsewhere. Alister Cameron's hotelier wrings a tea towel to suppress excitement at the prospect of disciplining a waiter. Dale Ferguson's design is luscious: crumpled maroons for the Cadogan and Neapolitan gauzy whites. Hare's pared-down script does not need wags as well as swags.